[FM - IJ] Love is a temple, Love the higher law

[changehistory]

1977

Is it getting better?
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you now?
You got someone to blame
You say
One love
One life
When it's one need
In the night
One love
We get to share it
Leaves you baby if you
Don't care for it

He pressed his hand against the glass, watching it reflected back off of the blinds that were open. The blonde man sitting on the bed reading looked up, startling blue eyes seeming to pierce through the window and layers of flesh, stripping away the few defenses Charles carried with him and looking to his soul underneath. It was always unnerving, but now he could see the depths of those eyes, could glimpse the flickers of a sort of madness that he had always taken for intense passion, before. It burned almost too hot, the fervor there, before the mask dropped again, and there was nothing but ice gazing back out at him. He nodded at the guard, then moved into the room, the cell, the place where they had locked up their leader, each of them playing Judas in turn, horror in their eyes at what he had almost done, though Charles knew most of them would have backed him if they weren't afraid of the same fate. Their eyes, too, held the fever glimpsed in Adam's.

It was a fervor he had believed in, until it turned dark, and standing in the cold, sterile room, watching as Adam leaned back against the wall of his prison, head tilting, one eyebrow arching in cool curiosity, Charles felt the loss of it with a keen edge that cut through him.

"I thought we were going to save the world."

"That was the plan," Adam said dryly, "Until Kaito interfered."

"You went too far."

"There is no such thing. Just because you cannot see it..." Adam shook his head. "This isn't about that, even. He wanted my position, and now he has it, just like his son before him."

Charles frowned, confused by the latter statement, but let it pass. "You can't blame him, Adam. You have to accept responsibility for your own actions."

Adam's mouth tightened, the only sign of his displeasure, and then his eyes slid back to his book, effectively dismissing Charles, who still stood there for quite a while longer, before he finally turned to go.

1987

Did I disappoint you?
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without
Well it's
Too late
Tonight
To drag the past out into the light
We're one, but we're not the same
We get to
Carry each other
Carry each other
One

"Come to beg me to repent again, Charles?" Adam asked, leaning back against the wall, studying his visitor. "I'd almost forgotten the anniversary, but here you are to remind me of it."

Charles settled in the chair, making himself comfortable, a habit he'd started sometime around the fifth year of visits. Perhaps he thought Adam would respond better if it seemed more like a casual conversation than ... whatever it was. For all his years, Adam had yet to figure out Charles Deveaux. "Is that what you want me to do?" Charles asked mildly. "Beg?"

"It seems a bit pointless, given the circumstances," Adam said dryly. "I'm hardly in a position to do any harm, and I take leave to doubt anyone has care for my mortal soul."

Charles' lips curved a bit at the irony, and Adam was glad to see it. Bob never got it, and it made conversation deadly dull. "I'm not here to beg, Adam."

"Then what?"

"To understand," the other man said softly, looking at him with those searching brown eyes that saw far too much.

"Understand what?" Adam asked, though he knew.

"We had such dreams, such plans...and now the others..." He made a face. "This Company is not what we dreamed of, Adam. We are not helping our own, we are experimenting on them, exerting power over them..."

"Trust me, I am well aware," Adam said, eyes darker for a moment, and he was pleased to note the slightly ill look that crossed Charles' face. He watched him a few minutes longer. "I disappointed you."

"You made me believe in a dream that never existed," Charles said in the harshest tone he had ever heard.

Adam felt a flash of pain for a moment, remembering a snowy night long ago, and his eyes dropped. "It existed. Once."

Charles stared at him for a long time, his gaze a weight on Adam's shoulders that he did not want to bear, then the chair scraped across the floor and he was gone.

1997

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head?

"Who did you think you were, when you started all of this?" Charles asked. He leaned against the wall, though the chair looked inviting. He was feeling more tired lately, and his doctors were not offering much hope.

"I didn't..." Adam started, then broke off, and Charles saw a moment of confusion in the immortal's eyes. He was forced to wonder what twenty years in here was doing, had done, to him. He watched those slender, unchanging, perfect fingers pick lightly at the blanket on the bed, finding lint and fuzz and tossing it aside like they had tossed...he shook the thought away as Adam's eyes met his again. "I wanted to save you, save all of you. To be the hero."

"The savior," Charles murmured, looking at him. "But it's not you."

Adam had returned his gaze to the blanket, but he snapped it up again at that, eyes dark and penetrating, looking for answers Charles wasn't sure he had. Things were shaping up in ways he didn't like, and Linderman was following in Adam's footsteps slowly but surely, while the man himself existed in a state Charles was sure was close to Hell. "What have you dreamed?"

"Hell, death, damnation..." Charles' lips twisted into something darker than usual. "Judgment Day is coming, Adam. Maybe not this year, or the next, but it is coming. And we...may all be doomed for our sins."

"We always were," Adam said, his voice almost loving. "How long?"

"I told you I don't know."

"Not that. The other. How long?"

Charles hesitated, wanting to ask how he knew, but he had long since stopped asking those questions of the man who even now was an enigma to him. "Six months, a year at most."

Adam moved, then, something he had not done in the last twenty years, crossing the floor to take Charles' hand in his cool ones, eyes searching as he looked at him. "Maybe I'm not the world's savior, Charles, but let me be yours."

God help him, he thought later, but his fear flickered and he closed his eyes and nodded his acquiescence.

2007

Did I ask too much?
More than a lot.
You gave me nothing,
Now it's all I got
We're one
But we're not the same
Well we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again
You say
Love is a temple
Love a higher law
Love is a temple
Love the higher law
You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can't be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt

The day came, and the day went, and Adam felt his gut clench, not having realized until it, too, was gone, just what that visit had meant every year. One person who still at least cared. One person who still wanted to believe. One person who remembered instead of casting him back into the depths of the darkest corners of memory. He had that, at least. Except now, he didn't.

He paced the room all day, back and forth across the floor, to the window, eyes searching, then pacing again. He even lowered himself to ask Elle when she brought him dinner, but all he got was a kiss and a shock for his efforts, which, while mildly distracting, was not what he was after. He sent her away, ignoring the pout that brushed across her lips, and moved to press his hand to the cold glass again, feeling the chill of it deep inside of his bones. His image reflected back at him.

They had fought the year before. Adam was at his arrogant worst, cold and sneering, Charles softly asking him to reconsider, asking how he could still believe he was right after all of this, asking, always asking, always reminding Adam that he was the fallen angel of their celestial sphere, the one cast out, the one disbelieved who had reached too high, but if he would just...The world would not be healed by fear, Charles snapped, out of patience, finally, but love.

And where was the love for him, Adam had returned, just as snappish.

Charles' eyes had tears in them as he told him that if he couldn't see that, he was truly blind, and then he had gone.

And this year, though Adam paced long past midnight, he did not come..

One love
One blood
One life
You got to do what you should
One life
With each other
Sisters
Brothers
One life
But we're not the same
We get to
Carry each other
Carry each other

He was sleeping, and Charles wondered how often he truly did that. It was different, this sort of travel, leaving the body hooked up to machines, barely hanging on. One word to Angela, a phone call to Daniel, and he could buy another year, perhaps even another decade before his body rebelled again and let the tumors spread once more. Adam would give that, he knew, but it was time. Perhaps it was cowardly, perhaps he was just tired, even he didn't know. He had seen what could come, knew what they were planning, and he had seen what he had dreamed of for thirty years.

He had seen their chance to save the world, Adam's chance, even, for without him, without setting it all in motion, it was possible, probable even, that the chance might never have risen, and Charles wanted to tell him that.

Love would heal the world, not fear. Love would save them all, pull them back together. They were all betting on the wrong brother.

He brushed a hand the other man would not feel through his hair, gently, slipping into his dream for a moment, a second only, before he finally let go and found his own peace, but he left the message behind in just a whisper.

"I know who he is."

Comments

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

Thank you!! Charles really does need to be explored, I've always thought. I mean, he is so very different than the other founders of the Company we've been introduced to. It makes him intriguing to me, and I want to know why he got into it, what he was thinking. This was sort of me trying to suss that out--that he bought Adam's dream of a better world, w/o realizing how Adam meant to create it. That some were caught by the Power of it all, but Charles--and in a way, Adam, too--were caught by the Utopian ideal.

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

Which is the saddest thing about the Company and Adam's own story - the best of intentions and the worst of circumstances. The world is never ready for change when it needs it, so it ends up being catastrophic. Charles must have understood that even though he, like the others, was obviously afraid of Adam's plans. Probably more than the others, he understood that Adam's goal wasn't completely about power, but about trying to create the ultimate change in order to make things better.

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

*nods* And I really do believe he wanted to rebuild a better world. Possibly in his own image, yes, and much of it was fueled by rage and bitterness and wanting to be God--but his points about how humanity keeps hurtling itself toward its own destruction really were on the mark.

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

No ifs, ands or buts. A very good idea, but not exactly one that most of us would want to deal with the aftermath of.

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

Yeah, no. Really not.